Blaming Coldcard users for the entropy vulnerability wrongly shifts liability away from Coinkite

In the early 70s, Ford rushed the Pinto to market under intense competition they were facing from cheap foreign imports. The Pinto's design cycle was hurried and unfortunately shipped containing a design defect where the fuel tank was positioned too close behind the rear axle of the car. This design made the car vulnerable to rear end collisions and greatly increased the likelihood of the fuel tank being punctured by the rear axle during a crash, causing the vehicle to catch fire and even explode.

To make matters worse, Ford allegedly became aware of the defect, but decided (in a later discovered memo) that it would be cheaper to settle wrongful death and injury lawsuits, than to fix the cars. As it turns out, the defect did cause injury and death, and after years of investigations and lawsuits, Ford was eventually found civilly liable (Grimshaw v. Ford) for the engineering defect and was forced to pay punitive damages to its victims. They were also charged criminally for the burn deaths of three teenagers in 1978, but were acquitted on those charges in 1980. They ended up recalling 1.5 million vehicles affected by the defect, that its own engineers claimed would have only cost only $11 to retrofit. It remains one of the most commonly taught case studies in business schools today.

There is much more to the Ford Pinto case if you are interested, but the main reason I am sharing this story is to illustrate that when a product is used as intended, at a certain point liability must shift from the user to the manufacturer. People who purchased Ford Pintos in the 70s had a reasonable expectation that the fuel tank was designed with safety in mind and wouldn't spontaneous combust from a common fender bender.

Likewise, Coldcard users had a reasonable expectation that the seed generation tool developed for their device would produce adequate entropy on par with industry standards in Bitcoin/cryptography. They should not be expected to audit every line of code to check for errors, just like Ford Pinto owners should not have been expected to measure the distance between their fuel tank and rear axle before driving the car.

We have this tendency in Bitcoin to be overzealous when it comes to personal responsibility/accountability. I do not think that's a bad thing per se, but there HAS to be a point where a user can reasonably say they did everything in their power to prevent something like this from happening. At SOME point, the liability for a commercial product to prevent damages must fall on the company and its engineers who designed the product, even if open source.

I think Coldcard users being expected to understand how to read code, much less review it and locate such a defect, is as unreasonable as expecting people to measure the distance between their fuel tank and axle. My condolences go out to all who are affected. This should have NEVER happened to coins in cold storage.